ALBANY — By force of will and a fierce work ethic, Gov. Cuomo has pulled off the near-impossible with a budget agreement that closes a $10 billion projected deficit without the tax hikes, fees and fiscal gimmicks that have been so common in the past.

Even more breathtakingly, he did it in the face of a spendthrift Legislature that had helped turn New York’s government into a joke line on “Saturday Night Live.”

Cuomo’s victory holds out the hope of inaugurating a new economic era that reverses the decades of private-sector decline and public-sector expansion that began with Republican Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller in the early 1960s.

Cuomo’s decision not to raise taxes also places New York in unique contrast to California, Illinois and Connecticut.

Paired with a similar decision made by New Jersey’s Chris Christie, Cuomo’s action could help redefine the bi-state area, now known as one of the most business-hostile regions in the nation.

Cuomo achieved his success through weeks of planning, analysis and an intense series of anticipatory tactics that friends and foes alike call three-dimensional political chess.

The governor’s smartest move came in late February, when he won the backing of 1199 — the giant health-care union whose enormous political clout frightens Democratic lawmakers — for his Medicaid-reduction plan.

Coming in second was Cuomo’s decision to insert a cap on trial-lawyer payouts from medical-malpractice lawsuits, a direct challenge to Silver’s outside employer, Weitz & Luxenberg.

While Cuomo didn’t get the cap, fighting it occupied a good deal of Silver’s time and weakened him in the process.

Cuomo also showed considerable originality in his budget negotiations: his insistence, for instance, that Medicaid and education spending be set for two years and not just one — thereby avoiding the Legislature’s predictable election-year spending spree. This was an Albany game changer.

Credit, meanwhile, must also go to two recent governors who, despite dismal records in office, helped blaze the path that Cuomo followed.

Last year, Gov. David Paterson, amid yet another lengthy budget-adoption delay, began using weekly extenders to force lawmakers to adopt entire sections of the annual state budget or be responsible for shutting down the state.

Cuomo skillfully broadened that approach to an outright ultimatum giving lawmakers three choices: adopt an on-time budget, pass an extender that contains the entire budget, or close down the state.

Gov. George Pataki deserves credit for two crucial lawsuits against Silver that in 2004 resulted in Court of Appeals decisions holding that New York’s budget-making process is under the governor’s, not the Legislature’s, control.

The decisions wiped out the Legislature’s past practice of rewriting whole sections of enabling language in the governor’s budget, effectively nullifying a governor’s ability to control the budget debate.

Cuomo, the former attorney general, ordered his staff to read the decisions closely and, with a copy of the decisions at the ready, he made it clear to the legislative leaders that it was he and not they who was in the budgetary driver’s seat.